Gingrich: $60,000 to hear me talk

Ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come up with a novel argument to deny he engaged in lobbying after leaving Congress: Gingrich claims he was raking in cash at $60,000 a speech on the celebrity lecture circuit.

“I did no lobbying of any kind — period: I’m going to be really direct, O.K.,” he told an audience in Bluffton, South Carolina, a state where Gingrich is spending a lot of time these days.

“I was charging $60,000 a speech and the number of speeches was going up, not down,” Gingrich boasted. “Normally, celebrities leave and they gradually sell fewer speeches every year. We were selling more.”

Gingrich is not quite at the top of the pecking order in terms of speech-giving. Former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has charged $100,000. Ex-President Bill Clinton has been paid six-figure honorariums in frequent forays into British Columbia.

As he rises in the polls — a new Public Policy Polling survey shows him with a 30-point lead over Mitt Romney in Florida — Gingrich is undergoing renewed scrutiny in the media.

He has had to explain a $1.8 million contract with Freddie Mac — the troubled mortgage giant, and a frequent Gingrich target — and told a debate he was giving Freddie advice “as a historian.”

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that companies were paying as much as $200,000 to join the Gingrich-sponsored Center for Health Transformation, and getting access to lawmakers. A spokesman for the Gingrich Group told the NYT that the consulting firm has earned $55 million over the past 10 years.

Gingrich’s latest move is to identify himself with President Ronald Reagan as an author of the supply side economics of the 1980’s.

“I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News on Wednesday night.